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New In The House

1: Sundance(ARC) – David Fuller: Legend has it that bank robber Harry Longbaugh and his partner Robert Parker were killed in a shootout in Bolivia. That was the supposed end of the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.

Sundance tells a different story. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Longbaugh is very much alive, though serving in a Wyoming prison under an alias.

When he is released in 1913, Longbaugh reenters a changed world. Horses are being replaced by automobiles. Gas lamps are giving way to electric lights. Workers fight for safety, and women for the vote. What hasn’t changed are Longbaugh’s ingenuity, his deadly aim, and his love for his wife, Etta Place.

It’s been two years since Etta stopped visiting him, and, determined to find her, Longbaugh follows her trail to New York City. Confounded by the city’s immensity, energy, chaos, and crowds, he learns that his wife was very different from the woman he thought he knew. Longbaugh finds himself in a tense game of cat and mouse, racing against time before the legend of the Sundance Kid catches up to destroy him.

By turns suspenseful, rollicking, and poignant, Sundance is the story of a man dogged by his own past, seeking his true place in this new world.

2: Faceoff(ARC) – edited by David Baldacci: Edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci and including stories by Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and more, this one-of-a-kind anthology pulls together the most beloved characters from the best and most popular thriller series today. Worlds collide!

In an unprecedented collaboration, twenty-three of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters—such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme—in an eleven-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos:

So sit back and prepare for a rollicking ride as your favorite characters go head-to-head with some worthy opponents in FaceOff—it’s a thrill-a-minute read.

and the ebooks:

3: Man In The Sky(review copy) – Danny Wynn: Would you risk your life for a stranger?

For seventy-three-year-old Jaime, the answer takes him by surprise. Accustomed to a lonely life high up in the mountains on the western coast of Mallorca, his dull routine is suddenly shattered when a man parachutes from a plane and lands nearby. The plane crashes; the man lives.

It’s a drug smuggling operation gone bad. But Stefan, the man from the sky, has escaped with eight kilos of cocaine in a gym bag. Jaime brings Stefan home and is soon entangled in Stefan’s attempts to sell the cocaine and start a new life.

As they dodge Parisian drug dealers and corrupt Mallorcan police, Jaime’s search for excitement and Stefan’s resolve to find stability lead them both down dangerous paths.

4: Shadow World(review copy) – Chris Impey: McEvoy is a truth-seeker. He has moments when he sees through the surface sheen of the world to a deeper reality, and moments when his sense of self dissolves. The Scotsman is restless, a wanderer. He flings himself into new relationships, even as he flees family secrets. In Shadow World, we see through McEvoy’s eyes as he grows from boisterous youth to a man defined equally by darkness and light. We meet his demons and his lovers. His adventure unfolds like beads on a string, with each episode separate yet connected. His journey takes him from the Arizona desert to the wilds of Patagonia, from the Silk Road in China to the lush countryside of Ireland, ending in a twilight zone near the Arctic Circle. Shadow World is a first novel by noted popular science writer Chris Impey.

Shadow World inhabits the boundary between narrative fiction and science fiction. It explores the tension between artifacts and natural forms, between reality and illusion, between the science that is and the science that might be. The novel is filled with intriguing characters. We meet a death camp survivor for whom music is everything, a relentless archeologist who is rewriting the story of human civilization, a mercurial sculptor who has a personality that mirrors her art, identical twins who inhabit parallel worlds of science and religion, a brilliant but raunchy astrophysicist, and an enigmatic philosopher who seems to know McEvoy better than he knows himself. By the end of his twenty-year odyssey, McEvoy has gained a startling insight into his reality, and perhaps ours as well.

My only purchase this week.

6: One Against A Gun Horde – Richard Prosch: Old gunnies, laconic lawmen, and the Peregrine’s return! Richard Prosch rustles up a compact herd of darkly humorous short stories from the way gone days of old Nebraska and Wyoming.

The stories are reminiscent of Prosch’s earlier collection, Devils Nest, as the stories in both sets are distinguish by humor, irony, crisp language use, and a vivid sense of setting. In One Against a Gun Horde, the unifying element is that the stories portray incompetent or even unlikely criminals. — John D. Nesbitt – from his Introduction